About

I study the contemporary forms of political rationality–the way in which government is taken up as a problem of expert reflection and is constituted as a field of intervention. My research has examined governmental practices such as economic regulation, social welfare, urban planning, and emergency management in Russia, the Republic of Georgia, and in the United States. My past work on Soviet and post-Soviet Russia sought to rethink how neoliberal reforms take up and transform the institutions of the Soviet social modernity. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work on political rationality, I have examined neoliberalism as an attempt to reanimate and modify the principles of classical liberalism in light of the social welfare state. My work on emergency government examined the emergence of “vital systems security” in domains such as natural disaster policy, homeland security, and infrastructure protection. My current research examines urban climate adaptation, with a focus on the role of financial instruments such as insurance in both framing adaptive agency and in structuring climate politics. This recent work has drawn on various sources of theoretical inspiration, from the social studies of finance to Claus Offe’s Luhmannian-Marxian state theory.

I am author of Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton University Press, 2011), co-author (with Andrew Lakoff) of The Government of Emergency (Princeton University Press, 2021), co-editor (with Andrew Lakoff) of Biosecurity Interventions (Columbia University Press, 2008), and co-editor (with Aihwa Ong) of Global Assemblages (Blackwell, 2005).

Full CV here.